This weekend I was at the second “DPLAfest” for the Digital Public Library of America. For a while I was in the national e-book program track. Participants from public and academic libraries, from consortia, from publishers, and from authors discussed what a national ebok program for libraries would look like. There were discussions of the multiple paths through which content could get into libraries: front-list titles, mid- and back-list titles, public domain works, independent publishers, and individual authors. And there was also discussion about many ways the ebooks could appear in libraries: in Adobe Digital Edition catalogs, through e-reader applications, in public access catalogs, and so forth. In between the sources and the destinations was the “marketplace” concept. And that reminded me of a similar architecture — the internet “hourglass”.

This is a preview of The Hourglass of a National E-Book Program. Read the full post (1850 words, 1 image, 7:24 minutes estimated reading time)

This International Standard specifies the transactions between libraries or libraries and other agencies to handle requests for library items and following exchange of messages. This standard is intended to at first supplement and eventually succeed the existing international ILL standards ISO 10160, ISO 10161-1 and ISO 10161-2, which are based on the outdated open systems interconnection model. The introduction of the draft standard provides some background on the relationship of the new standard to the previous one.

At the American Library Association meeting in Chicago last month I gave a 20 minute presentation that was a combination of an overview of interoperability and standards plus a brief overview of the ResourceSync activity for the NISO Update session. Included below are my slides with a synchronized audio track.

My employer (LYRASIS) is a member of NISO (the accredited standards organization for information and documentation in the U.S.), and as the primary contact I see and consider ballots for standards issues that impact LYRASIS member libraries. The Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Application Protocol Specification (a.k.a. ISO 10160/10161) is up for its periodic review, and there is a bit of interesting movement on this standard. ISO 10160/10161 became a standard in 1993 so it predates the modern era of the web. The group shepherding the standard realized that progress had overtaken the specification and they started work on a reformulation of inter-machine ILL standards. This ballot and its supplemental documentation gives a view of the plans.

This is a preview of Interlibrary Loan Standards Undergoing Revision at the ISO Level. Read the full post (308 words, 1:14 minutes estimated reading time)

My employer recently became a member of NISO and I was made the primary representative. This is my first formal interaction with the standards organization heirarchy (NISO → ANSI → ISO) and as one of the side effects I’m being asked to provide advice to NISO on how its vote should be cast on relevant ISO ballots. Much of it has been pretty routine so far, but today one jumped out at me — the systematic review for the standard ISO 2709:2008, otherwise blandly known as Information and documentation — Format for information exchange. You might know it as the underlying structure of MARC. (Though, to describe it accurately, MARC is a subset or profile of ISO 2709.) And the voting options are: Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw (the standard), or Abstain (from the vote).

This is a preview of What To Do With ISO 2709:2008?. Read the full post (626 words, 2:30 minutes estimated reading time)

Late last year I was asked to put together a 20-minute presentation for my employer (LYRASIS) on what I saw as upcoming technology milestones that could impact member libraries. It was a good piece, so I thought I’d share what I learned with others as well. The discussion was in two parts — general web technologies/expectations and mobile applications/web.

This is a preview of New Web Expectations and Mobile Web Techniques. Read the full post (1115 words, 4:28 minutes estimated reading time)

I’m pleased to announce that the Fall 2010 issue of NISO‘s International Standards Quarterly (ISQ) is done and available online to NISO members and ISQ subscribers. Print copies are scheduled to be mailed on December 28th. The individual issue is available for purchase (see the form link to on the issue homepage), and some of the articles are freely available on the NISO website. The theme for the issue is resource sharing, and I was privileged to be the guest editor for the issue. Included below is my introduction letter to whet your appetite for the full issue.

At the ALA Annual Conference exhibit floor I got my first chance to see the RDA Toolkit. RDA is “Resource Description and Access” — the new standard for bibliographic description of content. So this was the first time I really got to look at the RDA Toolkit. (By the way, you can look at it, too, during an open trial access period that runs through the end of August by signing up for it.) What really struck in me the demonstration, though, was that the site is as much a subscription to access the content of the RDA standard as it is a subscription to a delivery service with functions and features that go beyond the text of the standard itself. The text of the standard will be available in printed form, but one cannot get an electronic copy of the standard itself. This strikes me as sort of weird, so this blog post talks through that weirdness feeling.

This is a preview of RDA-as-Service Only. Read the full post (833 words, 2 images, 3:20 minutes estimated reading time)

From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Sunday the 2nd of August 2015 at 6:23:32 PM UTC (+0000). The URL to this page is

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